Nightcrawlers

1

The spades sinking into wet earth sounded like axes into soft necks. They rose and fell, shoveling out dirt and exposing roots, stones and worse things.

As the rain kept coming down, Kenney leaned under the overhang of the old farmhouse and watched the crime scene techs in their dark utilities and yellow rain slickers poking the earth, prodding it, digging into it like farmers working some grim harvest. He dragged off a cigarette and felt the chill and hated everything about it.

He thought: Eight of ’em so far, eight goddamn bodies.

They were laid out under plastic tarps next to the holes they’d been pulled from. Five women, two men, one child. So far. So far. Those two words kept ringing in his head. Eight bodies and here in a rural Wisconsin farmyard of all goddamn places. When he closed his eyes, he saw their ravaged faces that sometimes weren’t faces but discolored, fleshless canvases of bone. And that was all bad enough, mind you, until you factored in the condition of the bodies, the marks on them, and then it became considerably worse.

Chipney trod through the muck, said, “Eh, Chief, don’t take it so hard. I was supposed to get married tomorrow. I had the week off. You think I’ll get it now?”

“Not likely, Chip,” Kenney said, blowing smoke into the wind. “Way things look, none of us are gonna be seeing any time off here.”

Rain ran down the plastic bonnet of Chipney’s hat, dripped off the tip of his nose. “Lieutenant… Lou, shit, I didn’t see the bodies and I don’t plan on it either. But, you know, people here are talking. They’re saying things.”

“What things?”

“You know, about the bodies.”

Kenney flicked his cigarette away. It died in the rain like a shooting star. “What about ’em?”

“Well, that they’re not… whole.”

Kenney looked dire. “They’re not.”

“And that they look like they’ve been eaten.”

Kenney felt bile bubble up his throat. “Chip, we’ll discuss things later. For now, just get back out on that road. Keep an eye on those cops. Any goddamn newsies make it in here and I’ll personally shove ’em up your ass.”

“I think you might at that,” he said.

It was a personal joke and they both smiled.

Chipney stalked off into the rain, the night and wind.

The area was cordoned off. So far, nobody was really paying attention… but come morning?

The cops and techs raced around out there like spiders, backlit by flood lamps; the air reverberating with the diesel thrum of the generators.

Kenney stood there, thinking, thinking. Six hours before he’d been planning on a typical night—a takeout pizza and Monday Night Football—and then the phone rang. Wisconsin Electric had an easement from the county to run a new set of power lines to replace the old string that dated from the 1950s. This new run would cut right through a western fork of the Pigeon River State Forest outside Haymarket and continue across a stretch of abandoned farmland out on Bellac Road. Bellac was a lonesome stretch of abandoned fields, thickly wooded hollows, and gray ramshackle farmhouses and barns falling into themselves, all long abandoned. As the big dozer cleared a path through one particularly blighted field, the blade began to turn up bodies.

And that’s when Kenney was dragged into it.